The impacts of climate variability on conflict risk in conflict-prone regions worldwide

Abstract

The climate-conflict linkage is a topic of intense debate within the context of security implications. Previous quantitative studies exploring the causal link between climate variability and conflict risk present divergent findings due to the differences in modeling scale or strategies, such as the non-unified definition of conflict risk and the different settings of independent variables. Here we comprehensively assess the impacts of climate variability on conflict risk in conflict-prone countries worldwide at a unified grid-year level (0.5° × 0.5°) covering 2000–2019. Our analysis indicates that the impacts of climate variability on conflict risk exhibit the heterogeneity across conflict-prone countries. The meta-analysis shows that one standard positive temperature deviation (1σ), increased extreme precipitation, and decreased precipitation induce 0.81 %, 2.53 %, and 1.04 % increment respectively in the risk of conflict incidence, as well as 1.12 %, 2.55 %, and 1.15 % decrement respectively in the risk of conflict onset. Our results contribute to a better understanding of climate-conflict linkages in conflict-prone countries, which may partly explain the divergent findings of current research and highlight the importance of speeding up the work of adaption for global warming.